Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle

CHAPTER 12

USE CASE-BASED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Peter Haumer

IBM Rational Software, Schipol-Rijk, Netherlands

USE CASE authors have the difficult task of writing specifications for many different audiences. They have to balance the language, content, and style of their use cases for the needs of both non-technical and technical stakeholders. While most chapters in this book focus on non-technical stakeholders such as customers and users, this chapter discusses the developer as another important audience of use cases. To write use cases that are also useful to developers, analysts have to understand what developers will use them for. The difficulty is, of course, to keep the balance for the other audiences without negating the main benefit of use cases: facilitating interdisciplinary communication of requirements.

I will outline in this chapter the role Use Cases play for Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) as described in the Rational Unified Process (RUP 2003). I will begin by discussing the particular properties use cases possess that make them such a good tool for requirements management as well as for guiding software design. I will define additional concepts required for these tasks. Finally, I will walk you through a core set of analysis and design activities, examining the role use cases play for these activities, using examples from a web-based e-commerce application.

APPLICABILITY

• Projects with interdisciplinary team communication.
• Projects utilising object technology ...